I’d say repeating the Rails Guide tutorial several times first is a good place to start, then moving to Michael Hartl’s tutorial and completing that a few times, which will give you a much better understanding of even more complex Rails concepts.

I’m a strong advocate for learning through repetition, especially if you’re new to programming or don’t have a background in computer science.

I can’t believe that three months have already gone by, and that WDI is over. It was a wonderful experience and I’m glad I decided to go through it. Today we had a chance to work on our projects in the morning, and in the afternoon we presented our project 4. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people enjoyed my application. I thought it was a rough project that wasn’t fully complete, but it was great seeing that others thought it was good.

After our presentations, we did a few group activities to close off our experience at WDI. We did an exercise where we had a piece of paper taped to our back and everyone walked around writing things we liked about other people so they were receiving anonymous compliments. A couple of the students in the class created certificates for everyone that were pretty humorous. We also received GA backpacks and did a toast at the end of class.

Overall, the experience has been a really positive one. I doubted myself a lot at times towards the end of the course, but overall I did indeed learn a lot. I also met such a wonderful group of people who I hope I can stay in touch with for years.

Using Rails and JavaScript for my project has proved to be a good move. Instead of struggling with the technology and building out an application, I have been able to focus on building out my app.

Today was a pretty successful day – I created icons for all of the different sections of the site. I also found a fix for the weird offset issue I was running into. I also added the ability for users to change the difficulty level of the puzzles they created. Overall, things are slowly falling into place, and I’ve successfully launched all changes to the deployed app on Heroku.

My project is gradually coming together, and I’m feeling much better about things now that I’ve changed gears. I’ll definitely need to revisit front-end frameworks next week so I can feel more confident with them.

After spending a few hours working on my app, we had a break in the afternoon where the Outcomes team had a former instructor review the technical interview process that developers often go through. Since I’m not at all familiar with that process, it was pretty insightful to get a taste of what happens.

Later I played around with adding animations to my app, and discovered how fun SVG animations are. I’ll need to look into those more in-depth since they seem to be pretty powerful. Overall, today had several wins. I managed to set up user logins, deploy my app, add image uploading with AWS, spiced up the homepage with an animation, and looked into a few other ways to fine-tune the app. For tomorrow, I hope to work on the following:

Adding icons to each landing page

Rethink the puzzle index page

Rework the styling

Try to resolve the offset issue that makes the JavaScript puzzle act weird in Chrome and Firefox

I woke up at around 5am today to get started on rebuilding my project since I only have until Friday to finish it. I want to make sure that I can create as complete of an application as possible. I like how when my instructor heard that I was rebuilding my project, he told me that the deadline is really just an arbitrary date since we aren’t getting graded for the final project. But I told him that I still wanted to create something complete and portfolio-worthy. And that I can always revisit these more complex applications next week, when I don’t have the pressure of a deadline – even if the deadline is considered arbitrary.

I redid my application in Rails and managed the get the JavaScript puzzle functionality working, for the most part, as I’d like it to. Tonight I’ll work more on styling the application and fine-tuning the JavaScript functionality. Tomorrow I think I’ll add user login and launch it for the first time to see how it does live. Then I’ll take a look at some smaller “like to haves” that I’ll work on tackling one-by-one.

Ever since our third project, the group one, I’ve found myself feeling a little down about my abilities as a developer. I’ve been doubting myself a lot lately, and I’m realizing the problem is that I’m dealing with too many complex frameworks and concepts. Every now and then, I think it will be a good idea if I revisit concepts and technologies that I’m more comfortable with so that I can reassure myself that I am perfectly capable of building things. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the noise of all the languages and techniques that are out there. It’s a good thing to reevaluate where you stand.

The group project week is officially over, and I’m relieved. It was definitely a learning experience, and it was a bit tough having to tackle so much on my own. It’s a shame that I’m not that proud of the project itself, since it only incorporated some basic CRUD functionality, but I hope that the work I’ve done on it will inspire me to build something different in the future.

This weekend I plan to work on putting together a couple of stand-alone Angular apps so I can get a better feel of the language. I’m also excited to start brainstorming ideas for my next projects.

Today was the last full-day of the group project. I’m disappointed that my group’s application has minimal functionality, although I’m pretty proud that we learned quite a bit about how to work with the following technologies:

Angular JS (although I’d really like to work through a few more tutorials)

The struggle is real. Working a group has made me aware of several things in the web development process. First off, planning and communication are key.

My group has run into quite a few roadblocks. We haven’t been able to successfully transform the app into the type of project we want it to be. I suppose, looking back at this project, I will look at it as a learning experience. I’ve learned quite a lot, but haven’t successfully rolled out as many features as I’d like to.

Tomorrow is our last full day to work on the project. I’m hoping we can fine-tune our MVP, and find ways to dress up the app. We shall see how it goes! I’m realizing it’s important to stay optimistic, even when things aren’t turning out the way you’d expect.

Today proved to be a day of frustration for my group – we’re struggling with Angular quite a bit. I managed to build up the back-end coupled with Angular as the front-end, however I’ve run into issues getting CRUD to function for the API. Update and show are working, it’s just a matter of getting delete and new to work.

After a day of struggling with my code, I’m on the verge of scraping everything and rebuilding. Sometimes you need to cut your losses.

After an exhausting week of trying to get things to work, have things break, and also find myself unable to complete a few ‘nice-to-haves,’ I somehow made it through it all with a functional app that looks nice.

Today we worked on finishing touches for our applications. We also did screencasts of our apps to demo them. It was my first time ever making a screencast, and I’ll definitely need to do more of these in the future. Anyway, here’s mine:

I was really excited that this morning I managed to resolve my whole sending an image to the database issue. It was funny how I was almost in disbelief when I got it to work. Apparently I stared at my screen for a while and said, in disbelief, “I got it.” Everyone who was coding in the room cheered and high-fived me. They can definitely relate to how amazing it feels when you resolve an issue that seems impossible.

Later this week I hope to tackle some of my other unsolved problems. But for now, I’ll take a break and rest from this whole coding thing – I want my mind to definitely stay sharp.